That offseason, the Red Sox famously brought in future Hall of Fame pitcher and future Hall of Fame-level asshole Curt Schilling to, as it turned out, co-front the rotation. They also brought in Mark Bellhorn, Terry Francona, and maybe even more importantly, Keith Foulke. It was a murderer’s row of talent, from the front office on down. As it turned out, it was just barely enough to get past the Yankees in a second consecutive ALCS Game Seven. That was elation so high it lifted my ankles off the floor.

That two-year period where the Red Sox went from so close to winning to losing to so close to losing to winning represents certainly the most intense rivalry between two teams I’ve ever experienced or endured in my lifetime. And now, dear reader, 200 words into this, here is my point. The rivalry is back, my dudes! . It’s back! The Red Sox and the Yankees are the two best teams in the division, two of the three best in the AL and probably two of the best five or six in baseball. This season, this 2018, is going to be another huge brawl of a season. They got Severino, we got Sale. They got Judge, we got Betts. They got Stanton, we got JD. So I thought it might be instructive to look and see how these two teams stack up against each other, a tale-of-the-tape, if you will, or even if you won’t.

Let’s start here. PECOTA. The PECOTA projections are here and they are spectacular. Though maybe not if you’re the Red Sox. I’ve already detailed how the Sox individual projections maybe aren’t as positive as we’d wish they were, but in the end and as we all know, games are won on the field not inside spreadsheets. Which is good, because PECOTA has the Yankees finishing seven games up on the Sox after winning 96 games. By any measure, 89 wins for the Red Sox would be an unsuccessful season, but that’s where things stand as of now. FanGraphs does their own full season projections as well, and theirs are slightly more favorable to Boston (which makes them worth mentioning). They have the Sox at 93 wins, a game behind New York’s 94. Better, but not what we’re looking for.

So let’s go deeper. Let’s go position-by-position and see who has the advantage. I’ll give you the names and their projected WARP in parentheses.

Catcher

Gary Sanchez (4.4) vs. Christian Vazquez (1.7)

This is one of the Yankees’ biggest advantages. Sanchez is, bizarrely as it is to say, perhaps as good a hitter as Judge. Vazquez is a fantastic defensive catcher, but at this point in his career, that’s mostly all he is.

Picks

PECOTA: Yankees

Matt: Yankees

First Base

Greg Bird (1.5) vs. Moreland/Ramirez (combined 0.4)

We don’t really know what Greg Bird is as a player yet, but he was as highly touted as Judge was prior to the 2017 season, so there’s some nightmare fuel for Red Sox fans. He missed most of last season with an injury and didn’t hit well upon return, but he’s young and talented so much more is expected of him this season. Moreland is Moreland, and it’s still unclear to me why the Red Sox felt it necessary with a glut of talent available on the market, to give him a two year contract. Best case he and Hanley combine to form the two sides of a successful platoon, so that could happen. Or Hanley could remember that he’s actually a great hitter.

Picks

PECOTA: Yankees

Matt: Push

Second Base

Gleyber Torres (0.1) vs. Dustin Pedroia (1.3)

Torres is yet another great Yankee prospect, but for now we don’t know what he is at the major league level. Pedroia is an aging middle infielder coming off of surgery. So who knows on either of these guys.

Picks

PECOTA: Red Sox

Matt: Red Sox

Shortstop

Didi Gregorius (1.7) vs. Xander Bogaerts (1.4)

Ever since he’s put on the pinstripes, Gregorius has continued to get better. Over a similar timeframe Bogaerts’ numbers are going in the opposite direction. I’m still a Xander Believer though, more so than Gregorius who hacks at everything and seems like exactly the kind of hitter the juiced ball turns into something he isn’t.

Picks

PECOTA: Yankees

Matt: Red Sox

Third Base

Brandon Drury (0.4) vs. Rafael Devers (1.8)

Drury is Gregorius with a more boring name. He’s got some pop but he doesn’t take walks and he’s not much beyond average defensively. That’s a fine profile for a team with Sanchez, Judge, and Stanton, but it doesn’t move the needle much either way. Devers might be the second best hitter on the Red Sox. He’s that good.

Picks

PECOTA: Red Sox

Matt: Red Sox

Outfield

Left Field: Giancarlo Stanton (3.9) vs. Andrew Benintendi (2.1)

Center Field: Aaron Hicks (1.2) vs. Jackie Bradley (1.0)

Right Field: Aaron Judge (4.0) vs. Mookie Betts (5.2)

We’re doing outfield together because this is getting long. The funny thing to me is that the Red Sox are a team built on the strength of their outfielders. Their best hitter and maybe their second best hitter are both outfielders. Their best fielders are outfielders. This is an outfield-heavy team. And yet, up against the Yankees, the strength of this Boston team falls back. The Yankees won’t be able to keep up with Boston defensively but they won’t be bad there, and what ground they lose there will more than be made up for with their bats. Good lord, those bats. The “ifs” here are health. The Red Sox players haven’t shown any predilection for missing games to injury, but Stanton and Hicks both have missed significant time over their careers.

Picks

PECOTA: Yankees

Matt: Yankees

Designated Hitter

Brett Gardner (1.8) vs. JD Martinez (2.9)

I don’t actually know who is going to DH for New York, so I picked the best Yankee projection not included in the above sections and put him here. That’s Gardner. But no leftover Yankee is going to hold a candle to J.D. Martinez in the hitting department.

Picks

PECOTA: Red Sox

Matt: Red Sox

I was going to do the pitching staffs as well, but this has already gone on too long. We’ll leave that for next time. For now, the results. Counting the outfield as three separate positions, PECOTA has Yankees 6, Red Sox 3. I have Red Sox 4, Yankees 4 with 1 push.

Any way you slice this, and I’m sure Yankee fans would disagree with my analysis, it’s close. That we know. PECOTA shows that. FanGraphs shows that. Our eyes show that. It’s going to be another fun season. Buckle the heck up.

It also offered a clear rebuttal to Buck Showalter’s highly-questionable choice during Tuesday’s Wild Card game to save Super Closer and Cy Young candidate Zach Britton for a save situation that, at least in part due to his very decision, never arrived. It’s not apples to apples, but Showalter’s refusal to use Britton because he might need him later stood in stark contrast–a black hole in the sun kind of contrast–to Terry Francona’s bullpen usage, and, to only a slightly lesser extent, John Farrell’s.

Read the rest at Baseball Prospectus

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The Red Sox were playing the Orioles. Jonathan Papelbon, the man who has devolved from making history coming out of a bullpen to living in infamy for what he’s done in a dugout, gave up back-to-back doubles to Chris Davis and Nolan Reimold with two outs, and then Carl Crawford couldn’t handle a sinking liner from The Great (Robert) Andino. Reimold scored. Five minutes later, in a different east coast game, Evan Longoria hit a 317-foot liner into that weird little left field corner in Tropicana Field to cap a comeback from being down 7-0 to the Yankees, and that ended it all. The Red Sox were out of the playoffs.

The stunning part wasn’t that the games ended the way they did – the Red Sox were playing so terribly and the Rays were the exact opposite of that – it was how quickly how the roof caved in on that team. Boston had a 95% win expectancy in that final game! And it was all gone in an improbable instant.

After Mark Reynolds struck out, it took about 15 minutes for the Red Sox to lose everything. Ten minutes to the end of the game, and then five minutes to lose their ticket to October. Some say that’s still the best day of baseball ever, and I’d be inclined to agree with them, despite the debilitating mental trauma it gives me. Normally one game wouldn’t mean much in the long run, but this time, it was wildly different.

The effects of that night were shocking, yet oddly predictable. Apart from losing out on the postseason, the team’s 7-20 record in September probably torpedoed whatever chance Jacoby Ellsbury had at getting an MVP award, despite posting a 30-30 season with stellar defense and 7.91 WARP. Instead, the voters boarded the Justin Verlander hype train and rode it coast-to-coast, giving him and his 7.45 WARP not only the Cy Young, but the MVP award as well. To be fair, Jose Bautista outperformed both of them, but his team didn’t even sniff the playoffs, so that shows you what the voters truly valued here.

Then came the blame game. Smear pieces, chicken and beer, scapegoats, Tito Francona popping pills, you name it. Francona’s option wasn’t picked up either. Then the Cubs offered Theo Epstein the chance to be the greatest general manager in baseball history, and he took it. The Red Sox were handsomely compensated, of course, by getting Chris Carpenter. No, not that one. This one.

You know what happened from then on. Ben Cherington, Bobby Valentine, and whatever the hell 2012 was, for the most part. The Red Sox, who were so stable and so soundly built, just fell apart. Apart from the core of the team, nothing really seemed all that good.

The Nick Punto Trade and 2013 changed that. Cherington dumped a boatload of money on the Dodgers, used it to get useful players (no, not you, Ryan Dempster), and watched nearly half the 25-man roster have the best seasons of their careers. The Red Sox went and won a third title in 10 years with guys that made baseball so damn fun to watch, like Koji Uehara and Mike Napoli. It was exciting, magical, and most of all, it felt like redemption. It was also just one season, and one that wouldn’t be replicated. That isn’t an insult to a World Series-winning team, it’s a realization that it’s incredibly hard to do all of that again and still win it all.

While it’s been good since August 2015, everything between 2013 and that month was mostly bad. Since 2011, the Red Sox haven’t finished a season where they weren’t either first or last place in AL East. The worst-to-first thing was nice in 2013, but the oscillation in success really does a number on the guys in charge. After the 2014 campaign became an injury-plagued mess and the 2015 season crashed and burned in June, Cherington was replaced with Dave Dombrowski. It’s been a ride, to say the least.

The success of the Red Sox in 2016 feels different. The 2011 squad won 90 games, but that record feels hollow, and even more so when you’re looking back on it. This one, with the explosion of youth and the spectacular offense, is like a beginning. Guys like Mookie Betts, Jackie Bradley, Xander Bogaerts, and Andrew Benintendi make this team feel like it’s only starting to do great things, and that says a lot when those four have already combined for 13.7 WARP this season. Hell, Mookie Betts does so many spectacular things that it’s hard to pick just one, but here goes:

David Ortiz, the last man standing from all those near-mythical World Series teams, is playing so well that the statement “he’s having the best final season ever” isn’t hyperbole. Dustin Pedroia didn’t hurt his hand for the billionth time, and now he’s hitting. Hanley Ramirez is barreling up every single thing. The old guard – well, relative to the young guys – is doing amazing stuff again. This is good. This is fun. The best part is that it’s likely to keep happening.

The 2011 Red Sox had a bunch of guys flounder during their tenure on the team, and the 2013 team was good thanks to a lot of short-term additions complementing the players left from the Epstein years. Neither of them looked like they were built for continued success. This year’s team bucks that trend. With all these good young players, these Red Sox are set to be good for a while. The foundation for future teams is there.

I said the 2013 season was like a redemption. The 2016 season is like a rebirth. There’s more here than just one good season. With any luck, they’ll be great again next year, and hopefully a for few years after that. The Red Sox are, truly and thankfully, back.

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